It bears mention, for the sake of clarity, that if I had ever retained any faith in the weasel-worded, false-dichotomied lying points of either criminal cartel maintaining this permanent chokehold on American politics, the conduct of each during this invasion of Ukraine by Russia has left me absolutely disgusted with them both.
Here are two purely self-serving and extremely powerful super-factions, whose daily activities and claims leave me so unwilling to trust either of them as though they were acting in anything even resembling good faith, while both are so detached from reality as to be motivated by little more than sniping away at the other side with meaningless rhetoric they don't even believe themselves, that I am left wondering why any American in good conscience could ever willingly grant power to either of them.
I've spent the past fifteen years in Oklahoma, where the full-nelson OKGOP monopoly on governing powers is so entrenched and hidebound that 'rule of law' has long since become a kind of joke in bad taste, and generally suspected of probably being one made up by liberals. The comfortable and stable elite of upper-middle-class evangelical conservatives who run this place seem to be motivated by no passion more impressive than college football stats and sleazy tax dodges, while daily injecting heavy doses of far-right talk-radio so irritatingly alien to reality that one wonders how any self-respecting grownup could ever have allowed themselves to be subjected to such ridiculous and frankly stupid propaganda at all.
Meanwhile, throughout the full-scale war in Ukraine, I've done my patient best to hear out one western campus intellectual after another reciting the now-standardized sermon to the effect that Ukraine's war is important because Ukraine is fighting to uphold something called 'liberal democracy', whatever that means. Ultimately I have to take this silly posture as being presented in the same degree of bad faith and rank ignorance by western intellectuals as whatever it is their 'conservative' rivals claim to believe in.
From where I sit, I can hardly distinguish between one entrenched upscale elite primarily obsessed with college ball and sleazy tax dodges, and the other, suffice it to say.
I've been saying all along that Ukraine's second-worst enemy in this war is the current DC regime itself: for all its talk about some fairy tale of 'liberal democracy' as being at the heart of Ukraine's existential struggle to survive at all as a sovereign and independent state enjoying full autonomy over all its internationally-recognized (as of 1991) territories, one is hard-pressed to find any indication in DC Ukraine-war policies to suggest the slightest inclination toward facilitating the Kyiv state or the Ukrainian war effort toward achieving this aim. Whatever DC's current elite is after instead, by forcing Ukraine to fight this war without air superiority or any other strategic advantage such as long-range weaponry or NATO-doctrine overwhelming firepower on the ground, is anyone's guess.
On the other hand, after these fifteen years spent seeing firsthand the results of these MAGA morons having been for so long left to their own devices in running Oklahoma, what any of them actually believes in, aside from their idiotic superstitions about some imminent 'rapture' coming along and rendering all human conflicts in the modern era moot while some right-leaning deity whisks away all the Good Guys to some better place... I've given up even trying to guess.
How did we let any of these willfully-ignorant, self-admiring sociopaths end up telling us what to do?
And what has to happen in order for both factions of them to ooze back into whatever fetid swamp of untruth and vicious advantage-seeking they crawled out of, and leave us to manage our own affairs for ourselves?
It bears mention, for the sake of clarity, that if I had ever retained any faith in the weasel-worded, false-dichotomied lying points of either criminal cartel maintaining this permanent chokehold on American politics, the conduct of each during this invasion of Ukraine by Russia has left me absolutely disgusted with them both.
Here are two purely self-serving and extremely powerful super-factions, whose daily activities and claims leave me so unwilling to trust either of them as though they were acting in anything even resembling good faith, while both are so detached from reality as to be motivated by little more than sniping away at the other side with meaningless rhetoric they don't even believe themselves, that I am left wondering why any American in good conscience could ever willingly grant power to either of them.
I've spent the past fifteen years in Oklahoma, where the full-nelson OKGOP monopoly on governing powers is so entrenched and hidebound that 'rule of law' has long since become a kind of joke in bad taste, and generally suspected of probably being one made up by liberals. The comfortable and stable elite of upper-middle-class evangelical conservatives who run this place seem to be motivated by no passion more impressive than college football stats and sleazy tax dodges, while daily injecting heavy doses of far-right talk-radio so irritatingly alien to reality that one wonders how any self-respecting grownup could ever have allowed themselves to be subjected to such ridiculous and frankly stupid propaganda at all.
Meanwhile, throughout the full-scale war in Ukraine, I've done my patient best to hear out one western campus intellectual after another reciting the now-standardized sermon to the effect that Ukraine's war is important because Ukraine is fighting to uphold something called 'liberal democracy', whatever that means. Ultimately I have to take this silly posture as being presented in the same degree of bad faith and rank ignorance by western intellectuals as whatever it is their 'conservative' rivals claim to believe in.
From where I sit, I can hardly distinguish between one entrenched upscale elite primarily obsessed with college ball and sleazy tax dodges, and the other, suffice it to say.
I've been saying all along that Ukraine's second-worst enemy in this war is the current DC regime itself: for all its talk about some fairy tale of 'liberal democracy' as being at the heart of Ukraine's existential struggle to survive at all as a sovereign and independent state enjoying full autonomy over all its internationally-recognized (as of 1991) territories, one is hard-pressed to find any indication in DC Ukraine-war policies to suggest the slightest inclination toward facilitating the Kyiv state or the Ukrainian war effort toward achieving this aim. Whatever DC's current elite is after instead, by forcing Ukraine to fight this war without air superiority or any other strategic advantage such as long-range weaponry or NATO-doctrine overwhelming firepower on the ground, is anyone's guess.
On the other hand, after these fifteen years spent seeing firsthand the results of these MAGA morons having been for so long left to their own devices in running Oklahoma, what any of them actually believes in, aside from their idiotic superstitions about some imminent 'rapture' coming along and rendering all human conflicts in the modern era moot while some right-leaning deity whisks away all the Good Guys to some better place... I've given up even trying to guess.
How did we let any of these willfully-ignorant, self-admiring sociopaths end up telling us what to do?
And what has to happen in order for both factions of them to ooze back into whatever fetid swamp of untruth and vicious advantage-seeking they crawled out of, and leave us to manage our own affairs for ourselves?